Customizing the BIOS Boot Logo

Introduction

Have you noticed that every time you turn PC on there is a green and yellow logo from EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), as shown in Figure 1? Did you know you can alter this logo, and replace it with anything you want in the space where it is displayed? This tip is powerful, if you want to customize your PC. If you’re a service man or if you work in a store, you can use this tip to place your company logo, with your address and phone, transforming this feature in a powerful marketing tool.

Figure 1: EPA logo.

In order to apply our tip, some preconditions must be followed.

1. BIOS must be Award’s. That’s easy to discover: in the same screen where logo is displayed, there will be something like “Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG”.

2. You must mandatorily know your motherboard manufacturer and model. This is essential, because as this logo is recorded inside PC BIOS, what you’ll actually do is to perform a BIOS upgrade. If you don’t know who is your motherboard manufacturer and/or its model, read our “How to Find Out Your Motherboard’s Manufacturer and Model” tutorial.

3. Motherboard must accept BIOS upgrade via software, in other words, ROM chip must be of the Flash-ROM type (nowadays all motherboards use this kind of chip).

4. You’ll need to download, from motherboard manufacturer’s website, the necessary files to do a BIOS upgrade in your motherboard. Two files are needed: the program to record BIOS, normally called Awdflash.exe, and the file containing BIOS updated data to be recorded in BIOS (it’s a .bin or .rom file). For example, let’s assume that the necessary file to do the BIOS upgrade of motherboard Soyo 5BT is called 5bt-1b7.bin. We’ve written a complete tutorial on BIOS upgrade, you may want to read it before going further. Please download these files now.

Gabriel Torres is a Brazilian best-selling ICT expert, with 24 books published. He started his online career in 1996, when he launched Clube do Hardware, which is one of the oldest and largest websites about technology in Brazil. He created Hardware Secrets in 1999 to expand his knowledge outside his home country.